I want to share my experience, as a patent agent in Hong Kong, for working on Intellectual Property Protection in China and the rest of the world.

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Thursday, July 5, 2012

The problem of trademark protection in China

Everybody read about Apple settles iPad trademark case in China with payment of USD60 million to Proview. If you missed this news, you can check this out in New York Times.

This is only a reflection to what is happening in China related to 'well known' foreign trademarks. As we wrote earlier, we are getting cases related to trademark squatting in China. Individual, not a business, registers hundreds of foreign trademarks waiting to sell it. The iPad cases just proved that it can be a good business. Recent cases also demonstrated that posting a registered mark for sales is not a good reason for 'applicant with bad intention', the real trademark owner still have a hard time to fight back. All these combined, actually let the Chinese 'seller' set a higher price to sell the registered marks.

The bad things is, trademark squatting is spreading to Hong Kong. What we can tell is, if you value a name or symbol that your business had been using for a long time, and you have intention to coming to China or Hong Kong, do the mark registration ASAP.